nd of
personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear
that his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish
pleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with
his own. Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which
moved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their
bastards. Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of a
great idea. These two potent personalities completely understood each
other, and worked towards a single end. Tho mythopoeic fancy might
conceive of them as the male and female manifestations of one dominant
faculty, the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man and
woman of almost super-human mould.

Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man
of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned
Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental
dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten
by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in
the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time
tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another
treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no
match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in
unavailing passion. Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated in
his excommunication. The German nobles abandoned his cause; and Henry
found it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the settlement
of matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy. Gregory
expressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth from
Rome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076. He did not,
however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him that
Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army. Matilda
hereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety among
her strongholds of Canossa. Thither accordingly Gregory retired before
the ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by the
imperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a fair
countess to the monk who had been made a Pope. The foul calumnies of
that bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice, if
we did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynical
insinuation--a tendency which has involved the history of the
Renaissance Popes in an al